Photographs of Edward Johnston's blackboards at the Royal College of Art and Central School of Arts and Crafts were taken by one of his students, Violet Hawkes, who also arranged for many of his lectures to be taken down in shorthand.

The set of these photographs in the Special Collection is all-but complete. There are sets of these photographs in the National Art Library (presented by Dorothy Mahoney in 1975) and the Crafts Study Centre, Bath (CSC) (from Johnston's own collection, with additions from the Irene Wellington archive) lack one or two photographs present in the Special Collection, but contain a few which are not to be found here.(Recatalogued under MIS.1998 series.)